By Mark Peranson Published in Cinema Scope #96 (Fall 2023) First, another clarification for those who might have missed the nuance, or are not as inside baseball as I am: in the last issue the “open letter” from “Lisandro Alonso” to a certain French film festival director was obviously a ChatGPT joke—and as far as I am…

By Shelly Kraicer Chinese director, critic, novelist, and student of Taoist martial arts Xu Haofeng has made at least six beautifully crafted action films (five released, at least one in Chinese censorship limbo) since his wuxia debut The Sword Identity in 2011. 100 Yards, co-directed with his brother Xu Junfeng, is set in the Republican…

By Gabrielle Marceau In Hisham Zaman’s A Happy Day, three teenagers in Northern Norway attempt to run away from a centre for asylum seekers. But they haven’t gotten far when they’re discouraged by the insurmountable, snowy mountain between them and freedom. Sitting by the side of the road, they worry about freezing to death. “They’ll…

By Michael Sicinski Hur Jin-ho made his reputation on a handful of romantic dramas that were distinguished by their light touch and quiet rigour. It would be easy to complain about how leaden and overdetermined A Normal Family is in comparison to Christmas in August (1998) or One Fine Spring Day (2001), but let’s be…

By Winnie Wang When a dirt road is paved between the remote, mountainous village of Balankha and the city of Dharan, the two-day trek by foot collapses into a swift bus ride. This promising expansion introduces access to shiny conveniences and gadgets, flooding the countryside with confections, fizzy drinks, toy cars, televisions and smartphones. Insistent…

By Angelo Muredda  “I want to do something but I can’t,” ex-filmmaker Farid (Mirsaeed Molavian) tells his estranged wife early in Achilles, Farhad Delaram’s road-movie fable about breaking through political repression and administrative corruption in present-day Iran. Delaram’s directorial debut takes its title from Farid’s self-styled nickname. Like his mythological namesake, the aloof orthotist who…

By Lawrence Garcia The inciting incident of After the Fire is regrettably familiar: the murder of Karim, a 25-year-old Arab man, at the hands of police, in what a news report later calls a “sensitive neighbourhood” of Strasbourg, France. Riots ensue. The police say the cause of death was an epileptic fit, a claim that…

By Adam Nayman  Playing a mildly acclaimed—and tenuously tenured—novelist wary of up-and-coming race-hustling Black writers and the white-run publishing industry that enables them, Jeffrey Wright vibrates his way through American Fiction with a kind of bemused resignation: his acting is like a room tone machine set to “ambient contempt.” Suffice it to say that any…

Have you ever sat in front of a large poster depicting the human body without its skin? One muscle gets entangled into another, the precision and complexity of their web apparent in the areas that are most crucial for movement, but with the face on top of this transparent carcass looking very much alive.

By Angelo Muredda “You need to be a brick shithouse,” steely cheerleading coach Eileen (Evan Rachel Wood) scolds her neurotic new charge Riley (Devery Jacobs) in D.W. Waterson’s Backspot, an overstuffed but energetic youth sports drama that has just enough texture to stand out. Whether Riley takes that advice or finds another way to live…

By Madeleine Wall The only directorial debut to make it into this year’s official Cannes competition, Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s Banel & Adama is a clash of love and tradition in rural Senegal. At 18, Banel (Khady Mane) was widowed from Adama’s (Mamadou Diallo) brother, and as per tradition, he married her in his sibling’s place. This…

By Jordan Cronk With his tenth fiction feature, The Beast, French director Bertrand Bonello parlays his longstanding interest in the reverberations of history into a stark vision of the future. Starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as doomed lovers Gabrielle and Louis, the film follows the couple in multiple incarnations across the three distinct time…

By Madeleine Wall Documentary filmmakers James Burns and Stevie Salas, who previously worked together on The Water Walker (2020), have again turned their camera to an Indigenous environmental activist. Serving as both audience and director proxies, Haudenosaunee activist Layla Staats is the structuring force of Boil Alert; her hero’s journey is to learn about the…

Across 50 years of avowedly experimental practice—“experimental” in the sense that failure is a welcome possibility—she has advanced and refined our understanding of the mechanics of film as much as anyone working today. Naturally, she remains relatively unknown in North America. Born and raised in the Andes, trained industrially on English editing tables, and residing in Provence since the mid-’70s, Lowder has sought, with singular focus, levels of expressive precision beyond the single frame.

By Will Sloan In the weeks leading up to The Boy and the Heron’s Japanese release in July, Studio Ghibli offered no stills, no trailers, no clips—just a poster (with a hand-drawn image of a heron) and the promise that its beloved maker, Hayao Miyazaki, was back. That the film was a monster hit speaks…

The Breaking Ice is as aimless as its characters, whose outer orbital of disaffection keeps them hovering around one another, wandering around and smoking and staring at the dazzling neon lights with more attitude than purpose. In other words, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been assayed much more poignantly years ago by Hou Hsiao-hsien or Jia Zhangke. 

By Kate Rennebohm Published in Cinema Scope #96 (Fall 2023) The Fondation Chantal Akerman and Cinematek, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, have made available a remarkable find: four early shorts by the Belgian-born filmmaker, produced in 1967 when she was only 17 years old, which are now being exhibited under the program title Chantal Akerman: Her…

By Jason Anderson Published in Cinema Scope #95 (Summer 2023) “Strange people, the Etruscans,” one character muses in Alice Rohrwacher’s new film. “They believed the flight of birds predicted destiny.” It’s unclear exactly what La Chimera’s protagonist—played with the requisite brooding intensity, and a half-decent grasp of Italian, by English actor Josh O’Connor—is able to divine when…

By Madeleine Wall Under the neon sign, middle-aged Helen (Louise Brealey) begins her night shift at the local chicken factory. Her days are all the same, and though she takes comfort in her friends and coworkers, she is unable to leave her dreary life. She lives with her separated husband Greg, who has a much…

The Cannes Première of Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice’s first feature since Dream of Light (1992) over three decades ago, was immediately followed by a minor controversy. Conspicuously absent from the film’s screening, Erice published an open letter at El País explaining his reasons for boycotting the festival, namely, a marked lack of communication—and an implicit lack of respect—from Thierry Frémaux and his programming team regarding his film’s inclusion in the Official Selection, not in Competition.

By Giovanni Marchini Camia Published in Cinema Scope #95 (Summer 2023) Among the pantheon of directors whom Pedro Costa habitually invokes when speaking about cinema (Godard, Straub, Ford), the youngest I’ve heard him include, and certainly the only one to have emerged in the 21st century, is Wang Bing. It therefore felt appropriate that Cannes would program…

By Saffron Maeve An inopportune time to make a film about a lesbian conductor in a private relationship with her cellist gearing up to conduct Mahler, maybe, but Chloé Robichaud’s Days of Happiness is most invested in the tussle for control between a young woman and her overbearing father. A gifted, personable conductor and pianist,…

By Meg Shields It’s been eight years since Tarsem Singh released a movie. But that pales in comparison to the twenty years it took him to make Dear Jassi, a tragedy whose twists and turns would be unbelievable and overwrought if not for the horrifying fact that they really happened. The film dramatizes the events…

By Adam Nayman  The slyest Viggo Mortensen’s multi-hyphenate Western gets is when his noble Danish carpenter character—who’s arrived in San Francisco circa 1860 to see “the end of the world”—is seduced over a homemade meal by a French-Canadian florist played by Vicky Krieps. She serves him an omelette, of course, hold the mushrooms, and from…

By Michael Sicinski El Custodio (2006), the last of Rodrigo Moreno’s films to really gain traction on the festival circuit, was a grim but rigourous portrait of life at the periphery of power. The Delinquents is something else entirely. It’s a deconstructed film noir, not in the Derridean but in the culinary sense. Across its…

Where for many filmmakers the pandemic discouraged production or curbed creativity, it only seems to have inspired Radu Jude. Always impossible to peg, the prolific 46-year-old Romanian director has grown especially wily and provocative in recent years, embarking on a new phase in his career in which contemporary image culture and the sociopolitical absurdities of our time have become both subject of meticulous analysis and object of equally attentive ridicule.

By Saffron Maeve In his follow-up to the delightfully odious Sick of Myself (2022), Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli—alongside executive producer Ari Aster—conceives a cyclonic psychodrama in which evolutionary biologist and university professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage, hiding in his beard) attains overnight fame after appearing in everyone’s dreams. In these dreams, he is comically apathetic—buildings…

By Will Sloan Back during the height of the pandemic, when the fall prestige releases included a movie where Lucille Ball proved she was not a communist and an adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy (2020), I often wondered if the American film industry would ever get around to addressing the overwhelming poverty and despair of the…

By Adam Nayman There are probably more prudent ways to follow-up a left-field art-house blockbuster—and all-time-unlikely Best Picture nominee—than with an inscrutable, distinctly un-crowd-pleasing feel-bad eco-horror shape shifter, but even when experimenting with alienation effects, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is gifted enough that festival juries simply have to hand it to him. At a Biennale stacked with…

At 81 minutes, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves was the shortest film in a bloated Cannes competition. It was also among the best, accomplishing more with less (and in less time) than any number of overwrought productions, a notion evidently shared by at least some members of Ruben Östlund’s jury, which awarded the film its namesake third runner-up prize, making this only the second honour Kaurismäki’s received from Cannes after winning the Grand Prix for The Man Without a Past in 2002.

By Saffron Maeve Making onscreen BDSM appear tedious and pedestrian is a great bit, not only because it seems to encapsulate the sexual incongruity of New Yorkers within a particular age bracket, but because it desaturates the very act of sex; it’s as if we’re watching a faucet drip or a mattress inflate. As with…

By Madeleine Wall With its double epigraph from Simone de Beauvoir and Diablo Cody, Molly McGlynn’s Fitting In wears its heart, and its influences, on its sleeve. As the new girl in town (somewhere in New Jersey), teenage Lindy (Maddie Ziegler) is navigating a new school, her nascent dating life, and her barely-holding-it-together single mother…

By Michael Sicinski  Ambitious but flawed, Four Daughters exhibits the signs of a director punching above their weight class. Ben Hania’s previous film, The Man Who Sold His Skin, was essentially one big metaphor looking for a context, and although there is inherent interest in Four Daughters’ true story—after a gradual radicalization, two eldest sisters…

“My grandmother once told me in Navajo storytelling, symbols mean more than facts. And time means nothing at all.” What follows this declaration in Billy Luther’s narrative debut Frybread Face and Me inches the film away from that promise of experimentation towards a straight-forward coming-of-age story; still, the tension between Luther’s experience as a documentary filmmaker and the fictional story of a Navajo pre-teen’s summer spent on the Rez generates at least the potential for an alternative narratological approach.

French filmmaker and ethnographer Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau’s unfinished portrait of the Kuna people becomes the scene of a postcolonial autopsy in Andrés Peyrot’s absorbing documentary God Is a Woman. Peyrot’s film follows the contemporary interventions of Kuna elders and intellectuals such as poet and professor Arysteides Turpana and filmmaker Orgun Wagua, who seek to restore, contextualize, and screen Gaisseau’s footage to the community whose images were distorted and plundered for Western consumption in the original, unreleased documentary.  

By Jordan Cronk Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s best film in years falls into that most familiar of modern day genres: the migrant drama. Co-written by Holland, Maciej Pisuk, and Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko (and directed in collaboration with Kamila Tarabura and Katarzyna Warzecha), Green Border is set on the threshold of Poland and Belarus, where, beginning in…

By Phil Coldiron One frame is documentary; two is fiction. Two frames are documentary; one is fiction. So far as I know, film’s “Shape as Form” has yet to be written. Whenever someone gets around to adequately theorizing the functions and complications of certain industrial givens, of our wholesome and oppressive little family of rectangles,…

By Adam Nayman Hell of a Summer marks the feature co-directorial debut of Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard; it’s a good bet that without his name on it, it wouldn’t be here. Not to begrudge Wolfhard and his collaborator Billy Bryk their evident shared love of both slasher movies and Wet Hot American Summer—passions worth…

A film of uncommon warmth and delicacy, Bas Devos’ Here confirms a newfound sense of style and maturity in the Belgian filmmaker’s work that first appeared in the finely tuned nocturne Ghost Tropic (2019). Like that clearly pivotal project, Devos’ fourth feature—which won the top prize in the Encounters section at this year’s Berlinale—finds the 39-year-old director levelling up by scaling down.

Cody Lightning’s mockumentary, a pseudo-sequel to Smoke Signals (1998), received some vicious reviews following its world premiere at Tribeca. But to call the film aimless or declare it an outright shambles is to profoundly miss the point. In an industry that still demands positive images and model minorities, Hey, Viktor! is a self-portrait of the artist as a complete asshole.

By Jordan Cronk More than any American filmmaker of his generation, Richard Linklater has made a career out of alternating between personal and commercial directorial projects. That these more mainstream offerings don’t suffer as frequently or as dramatically as do any number of comparable efforts by his contemporaries speaks to the integrity of Linklater’s approach…

By Will Sloan Opening with an early-‘70s MPAA disclaimer, and layering film speckles over its opening titles, The Holdovers wastes no time announcing itself as The Sort Of Movie They Don’t Make Anymore. Six years after the poor reception that greeted his audacious Downsizing (2017), Alexander Payne’s return is as comfortable and familiar as an…

By Winnie Wang The return of cultural items from national museums to their homelands is an ongoing process that does not simply end when the artifacts are handed over, or when the descendants of a community finally repossess ownership of their image. For co-director Suvi West, who follows the repatriation of Sámi objects to Sápmi—a…

By Gabrielle Marceau  Three British teens—Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) and her two besties—touch down in Greece for a holiday. After swimming in the ocean, they decide they want fries, and the resort town, designed to cater to British tourists, provides. Fries are the only sustenance they’ll get on the trip, aside from drugs and buckets of…

Born on the extreme margins of an industry that is still only barely interested in product that isn’t either a sequel, remake, or reboot, Williams’ Surge saga is a franchise befitting the current climate of arthouse filmmaking, wherein conventions of continuity, plot mechanics, and psychological clarity are increasingly being challenged, if not outright dismissed. We have no idea where we’re going, but we seem to be getting there fast.

Basically, this is a decent, if predictable, short comedy rattling around in a luxuriously textured feature-length container (the velvety cinematography is by Stephane Lafleur), and what keeps it from getting deadly in the home stretch is the combined finesse of its actors, including Montpetit, who’s got a sublimated intensity that’s far richer than what’s written in the script, and able deadpan clowns like Steve Laplante and Marie Brassard, both seen recently in Lafleur’s Viking (2022).

By Angelo Muredda  A sexual assault sends a young Toronto musician into a frantic two-day scramble to pay for HIV-prevention meds in M.H. Murray’s compelling feature debut, I Don’t Know Who You Are. What starts as a gentle account of Benjamin (Mark Clennon, also the story editor) ambling through a budding romance with new love…

Polish documentarian Maciek Hamela captures the devastation as well as the complicated hope of life in transit in In the Rearview, a record of his efforts to transport hundreds of Ukrainian refugees into Poland following the Russian invasion in early 2022.

An unassuming feminist drama that sneaks up on you, Inshallah a Boy lays out the facts of sexism in Jordan with precision, communicating its protagonist’s exhaustion directly to the viewer.

By Robert Koehler Published in Cinema Scope #95 (Summer 2023) Cinema has always had to defend itself against the pressures of business and capital, and yet, because filmmaking remains expensive (contrary to the false digital fantasies of “cheap” cameras), it is business and capital that continues to keep cinema going. This contradiction of conditions deepens when the…

By Josh Lewis Oskar Schindler looms large in the cinematic memory of Righteous Among the Nations recipients, an honorific title given to gentiles who performed extraordinarily risky acts to save Jews from death during the Holocaust. The aim of Irena’s Vow appears to be to elevate Irene Gut Opdyke’s name to that same status. Based…

By Gabrielle Marceau An absurdly yellow fog hangs thick over the churches, cemeteries, and stylish apartments in Ginevra Elkann’s I Told You So—an inescapable sign of incoming planetary collapse. But the quirky characters in this apocalyptic vision—a priest battling addiction, a house-bound grande dame, the lonely compulsive eater who cares for her, and an alcoholic…

After The Traitor (2019) and the series Exterior Night (2022), Marco Bellocchio, aged 83, continues to explore the darker stories in Italy’s past. With Kidnapped, he turns to the sins of the Catholic church in the 19th century with the true story of young Edgardo Mortara (played beautifully as a child by Enea Sala), who was taken away from his Jewish family after it was discovered that his Catholic nurse had secretly baptized him when he was ill, fearing for his soul.

By Josh Lewis There are few cinematic tools that provide as immediate elevation to a premise as the train setting does. The inherent sense of motion, propulsion, and time that it can provide a thriller especially is indispensable, which is what makes Indian filmmaker Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s bluntly titled Kill—lost somewhere between an incredibly generic,…

By Josh Lewis “People die, remember?” East Coast island mayor Bobby (Clayne Crawford) calmly has to remind his wife Grace (Lara Jean Chorostecki) in The King Tide—a new slow burn quasi-folk horror indie drama from Newfoundland & Labrador-born director Christian Sparkes. At that point, Bobby’s community has been struggling against the increasing influence of mainland…

By Adam Nayman Say what you will about Birdman, but as a legacy showcase for Micahel Keaton, it was right on time, mining the tension between its lead’s off-kilter charisma and unlikely superstardom. Knox Goes Away, meanwhile, is strictly Oscar bait, with Keaton serving as his own director in a showy role; the amnesiac gimmick…

This year, the ever-industrious Saïd Ben Saïd has commissioned Catherine Breillat—for the 75-year-old director’s first film since 2013’s autobiographical Abus de faiblesse—not to specifically reimagine the story of Phaedra à la her other literary adaptations, but rather to remake May el-Toukhy’s 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts, in which a successful lawyer has an affair with her adolescent stepson.

Since beginning his feature directorial career in 2002 with Beneath Clouds, Australian writer-director Ivan Sen has carved out a space for himself as one of his country’s prominent post-colonial filmmakers, taking familiar plot strands from coming-of-age, crime and road movies and giving them a meditative atmosphere concerned with the specific identity crisis at the intersection of the historical racist abuse and barren landscapes of the Outback.

By Ally Oman It’s an easy enough mistake: when two brides, Jaya and Phool, board a train wearing identical wedding saris and veils over their faces, there is no way for their new husbands to recognize that each has mistaken the other man’s wife for his own. With jaunty humour, Kiran Rao’s Shakespearean mistaken-identity tale…

Mademoiselle Kenopsia is centrally concerned with liminality—those spaces that oscillate between familiar and surreal, enduring in transitional stasis. The dimensions of transition can be temporal, as in sun-bleached plastic jungle gyms that evoke the passage from childhood, or spatial, as in secluded motels in the middle of road trip destinations.

In making the transition from documentary to feature film, Brussels-based Cameroonian director Rosine Mbakam builds on her greatest strength, which is portraiture. Like Delphine’s Prayers (2021), Mambar Pierrette is an intensive look into the life of one overworked but resilient woman, struggling to keep her family afloat against all odds.

By Angelo Muredda Volpi Cup winner Peter Sarsgaard comes down with a serious case of movie dementia, the romantic kind that makes you look more rakish in a blazer and scarf the sicker you get, in Michel Franco’s Memory. Though ostensibly a kinder Franco than the one who made After Lucia and New Order, the…

By Michael Sicinski In all likelihood, Frederick Wiseman is already prepping his next project. He is indefatigable. But if it happens that Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is his final film, it would be a fitting capstone to a singular career. After spending most of his filmmaking life producing incisive documentary analyses of dysfunctional institutions and lumbering…

By Angelo Muredda The more Seoul changes, the more it stays the same in Kim Taeyang’s understated and striking debut Mimang, which tracks the shifting fortunes and life milestones of a young illustrator and a film lecturer over a series of walks and drives through the city. Bantering and flirting, they muse about romantic and…

By Lawrence Garcia The Godardian dictum that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun was never intended to be a model of plot construction. Whatever it meant to Griffith, to whom Godard attributed the phrase, it could not, for the latter, stand as a mere formula. Indeed, what films…

By Michael Sicinski The governing formal conceit for Asmae El Moudir’s feature debut would have been more impressive had Rithy Panh not beaten her to the punch ten years ago. In working to explore the gaps in her childhood memories, as well as the history of oppression in Morocco under Hassan II, El Moudir reconstructs…

By Will Sloan  Failure and frustration are a spectrum, not a binary. Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), a Haitian immigrant in Miami, has worked hard and faithfully for a Miami construction company for many years, and his efforts have rewarded him with a small house in the Little Haiti neighbourhood. There, with his seamstress wife Esperance (Sheila…

In Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe, director Robert McCallum presents a profile of Coombs, his family, and the changing face of Canadian media; he outlines the life and afterlife of what is clearly more than just a TV show. 

The compositional tropes of various high modernists, Bresson above all, loom large. Schanelec’s invention, instead, is tonal, a chording of irony and earnestness which allows her to handle the hottest emotions without ever being burned. Taken in other terms, this too looks more like refinement than invention: she is alone among her contemporaries in her capacity to reconcile the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

By Josh Lewis The Midnight Madness program at TIFF wouldn’t be complete without at least one anxiety-inducing, run-all-night thriller, and this year’s comes courtesy of Saudi Arabian filmmaker Meshal Aljaser, who’s managed to find a specific spin on it: taking the relationship between rebellious daughter (Sara, played with a determined, frustrated intensity by Adwa Bader)…

By Saffron Maeve Luke Gilford’s pastoral re-spin manifested first through his own history with the International Gay Rodeo Association (queering Americana since 1985), then as a photo series, art exhibition, pictorial, and now a feature film, helmed by the photographer himself. Dylan (Charlie Plummer) is a 21-year-old construction worker supporting his unaffectionate, alcoholic single mother…

By Meg Shields Wouldn’t it be great if the guy behind Hunt For the Wilderpeople and Boy took a break from counting his Marvel money to make another intimate, small-stakes feel-good drama set in Polynesia? Pay no attention to that curling monkey’s paw. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. Based on the 2014 documentary…

By Saffron Maeve [Email to editor upon submission of capsule; “why is every movie TÁR?????”]  It now seems a cinematic truth that conducting Mahler’s 5th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic consigns one to existential fracture or total erosion. Nina (Maren Eggert), the accomplished protag of Hanna Slak’s Not A Word, is in the middle of…

The third feature film by Filipino experimentalist Miko Revereza may be his most conventional work to date. But as one settles into Nowhere Near it becomes evident that this is by design. Where many of his previous films have addressed the almost hour-by-hour challenges faced by undocumented immigrants, here Revereza casts a somewhat wider net.

As the set is transformed in plain sight, the meta elements dissolving into a concentrated fantasy, the filmmaker’s own voice replaces the actor’s. Unseen, Paul B. Preciado asserts that, in Woolf but perhaps in general, “the first revolutionary metamorphosis is poetry,” which he defines as “the possibility of changing the names of all things.”

By Madeleine Wall The young and beautiful Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is ripe for marriage, and every man in the village has eyes for her. Unfortunately, Jagna is only interested in the married Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), and their star-crossed romance is the kindling to Jagna’s demise. The second hand painted feature animated film by  DK and…

Is Wim Wenders back? If he is, I’m not sure it’s such a good thing. Perfect Days, the tenth film by the German director to compete at Cannes, is a working-class yarn about the pleasantly banal routines of a toilet cleaner named Hirayama (Yakusho Koji), a beguiling loner with a beautiful soul who is harbouring a trauma that is never fully articulated by the film. Sound familiar?

“All the cinemas went extinct,” observes a street vendor who used to sell movie posters and lobby cards behind the film distribution centre in downtown Recife, Brazil, before the bottom dropped out of the market. The kicker: this interview was recorded 30 years ago.

By Robert Koehler It is good to witness John le Carré rising from the dead for a final, rare, and elaborately staged interview with filmmaker Errol Morris in The Pigeon Tunnel, an odd kind of audio-visual accompaniment to Le Carré’s autobiographical book, subtitled Stories from My Life, and published in 2016, four years before his…

By Josh Lewis Of the dozen or so actor-turned-director features at TIFF this year few had as endearing a concept as Poolman; a Big Lewbowski-esque paranoid stoner-noir with a long-haired, short-shorts-attired Chris Pine as the himbo-goofball city council activist/pool cleaner Darren Barrenman (aka DB), who stumbles upon a literal Chinatown LA water conspiracy. Unfortunately, movies…

By Meg Shields It’s time to reset the clocks: we’ve got a genuinely delightful American studio comedy on our hands. Rising above its “hmm” status as a direct-to-Hulu original, Quiz Lady is a charming, unpretentious cinematic equivalent of mac ’n cheese. It’s not going to surprise you. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The…

By Josh Lewis  Among Netflix’s many crimes against artistry (the algorithmic dumping ground they greet their acquisitions with, back in the news: not paying their creatives fairly, etc.), one of the more underrated is their absorption of the trashy, stylish genre programmer. Back in the day, a comically bleak piece of Southern Gothic exploitation like…

By Gabrielle Marceau At a time of renewed anxiety over A.I. encroaching on our lives (usurping artists, stealing screenwriting jobs, replacing lovers) and making them increasingly atomized, Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams weaves a tale about the way humans (or here, a menagerie of anthropomorphized animals) will callously exploit and discard robots, even the very friendly…

By Adam Nayman In addition to being one of the rare Sundance breakouts to earn its all-hands-on-deck hype, Kitty Green’s 2020 office horror movie The Assistant was a heartening example of less really being more.  Its well-stocked inventory of individual and institutional microaggressions added up to a granular, lived-in portrait of film-industry exploitation and, crucially,…

Despite the changes that Cahiers du Cinéma has undergone over the years, its legacy still carries some critical authority—enough, at least, that its apparent endorsement of Weston Razooli’s debut feature, Riddle of Fire, which graced the cover of its Cannes issue back in May, was enough to convince me to see the film.

By Saffron Maeve Pulled from the pages of Kim Thúy’s award-winning novel of short reflections on family, refuge, and identity, Charles-Olivier Michaud’s Ru surveys an affluent Vietnamese family escaping to Quebec on the heels of the Fall of Saigon. Ru is mostly observed through the eyes of the family’s young daughter Nguyen An Tinh (Chloé…

By Gabrielle Marceau  If you’re one of those people who’s gotten hooked on Showtime’s Couples Therapy or podcasts like Esther Perrel’s Where Should We Begin, you’re accustomed to the arduous but rewarding process of working through a relationship’s Gordian knots and the incredible breakthroughs when patterns are broken, defences are shed, and connections restored (at…

By Adam Nayman Published in Cinema Scope #96 (Fall 2023) “Nothing more Satanic or artistic has been seen on the German stage,” wrote one critic of the premiere of Salome in Ganz, Austria in 1891. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross describes the unveiling of Richard Strauss’ opera—which climaxed, like Oscar Wilde’s source play and the…

By Josh Lewis Since Fire on the Plains (2014) and Killing (2018), legendary Japanese cult filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto—more commonly known for his grotesquely textured, sexually repressed science-fiction and horror films—has found himself obsessed with and lost in the tormented ruins of post-war Japan. Shadow of Fire specifically concerns itself with the innocence of a child…

By Adam Nayman Everybody knows somebody like Dimman (Joel Spira), the harried, hapless huckster at the center of the Swedish thriller Shame on Dry Land. The trick, if you want to hold on to your friendship—or your money—is to not get to know him too well. Climbing ashore into the stultifying climes of Malta after…

By Michael Sicinski Apolline Traoré’s latest film is direct, and in times of political strife there is undoubtedly something to be said for directness. Burkina Faso has become a hotbed of terrorism of late, with various factions affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara moving in from Niger and Mali. Meanwhile,…

According to Bong Joon-ho, Jason Yu’s Cannes entry Sleep is “the most unique horror movie of the past decade”; either director Bong doesn’t get out very much or he’s being a mensch on behalf of his former AD, who should take the pull quote and run with it.

By Gabrielle Marceau In Pema Tseden’s latest film (and perhaps his last: he passed away this May during post-production), a snow leopard in the Tibetan countryside is held captive in a sheep’s pen after killing nine rams. We see its story from a number of angles: inflexible bureaucrats imposing a nationalist agenda; an incensed herder…

By Winnie Wang “At least it’s a huge sum the government is paying you, and you won’t be drowning in debt,” quips the state official, hoping to ease the tension after seizing an elderly man’s land. Following the evacuation of his farmhouse in the Icelandic countryside due to flood risk, Gunnar (Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson) begrudgingly…

By Michael Sicinski A fairly conventional film in punk attire, Spirit of Ecstasy suggests what might have happened if Lisbeth Salander had decided to go into finance. Claire Pommet, the singer-songwriter professionally known as Pomme, plays Jeanne, a 24-year-old military brat with an icy demeanour and a dizzying facility with applied calculus. They’re trying to…

By Saffron Maeve In which Pedro Almodóvar vows to suspend anachronisms and remain faithful to the genre of the Western: Strange Way of Life, the director’s latest 30-minute short sees two former lovers, Jake (Ethan Hawke) and Silva (Pedro Pascal), reuniting after 25 years, just as a murder is being pieced together in town. Due…

By Will Sloan Saying “a camp for queer youth in rural Alberta” tends to summon an image of something very different from Camp fYrefly, the three-day retreat for teens who self-identity across the queer and trans spectrum. This documentary chronicles one such retreat, during which friendships are made, shy kids emerge from their shells, kids…

By Gabrielle Marceau It seems every ballet documentary has to have an image of feet. Usually bloody and bandaged, pulled gingerly out of a pointe shoe, the dancer’s mangled foot betrays the agony required of the art, but also reveals our desire for confirmation that ethereal beauty has a price in pain. Chelsea McMullan’s Swan…

By James Lattimer It’s never a bad time to bring up the mechanisms of colonialism, whether in the Netherlands or elsewhere, although one might wish for a less obvious conversation starter than Sweet Dreams. Ena Sendijarević’s period drama paints the casual brutality of life in the turn-of-the century Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia, with brush…

By Madeleine Wall A docu-fiction hybrid scripted entirely in Inuktituk, Tautuktavuk is the most recent Isuma Collective production, another stand-out in their radical practice of filmmaking. Directors Carol Kunnuk and Lucy Tulugarjuk, who are real-life cousins, play sisters Uyarak (Tulugarjuk) and Saqpinak (Kunnuk). Separated by land and lockdown, these women must cross real and virtual…

The hermetic, ensemble classroom setting has long served as an easy access point for filmmakers to make microcosmic sociological observations about The State of Things, or locate that particularly stressful, malleable time when people are typically having their first experiences with complex adult interactions, institutional politics, and rebellion.

By Jay Kuehner The dulcet caress of bossa nova often belies a sense of soft anguish and deep melancholy, the form giving expression to an excess of longing in both lyrical and musical form. Something similar might be said of Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscol’s tribute to one of the genre’s lost virtuoso pianists, Francisco…

By Michael Sicinski Godard’s first posthumous work could be taken as a suicide note for cinema itself. Throughout his career, Godard repeatedly aimed to “return to zero,” to unlearn the discipline of filmmaking and begin again. But certain axioms always persisted, such as images, motion, and temporal progression. Phony Wars goes back before zero, before…

By Madeleine Wall On her trip home to the northern village of Sápmi, Lena’s (Risten Anine Kvernmo Gaup) bus nearly hits a deer. This isn’t an unusual occurrence for the Sami community, whose relationship with reindeer is fundamental to their culture, but Lena notices the reindeer’s herder, Mahtte (Nils Ailu Kemi), for the first time.…

By Madeleine Wall Splattered over the news and the internet, Poland’s migrant crisis has been making headlines for years. In response, aggressive security measures have been installed, including building a 186-kilometer steel and barbed wire wall along the Belarus border to keep them out. Navigating more than one boundary, Kasia Smutniak’s documentary Walls is a…

By Michael Sicinski Published in Cinema Scope #96 (Fall 2023) A few years ago, I interviewed the artmaking team of Dani and Sheilah ReStack, a married couple with children who described their work as based on the concept of “feral domesticity.” It’s a conceptual oxymoron, since the two words suggest opposite sensibilities with respect to the home…

By Adam Nayman In horror movies—as in life—rules are made to be broken. After learning that one of their fellow villagers has been infected with a demon, two ornery brothers—one a family man, one a wildcard, neither particularly bright—decide to transport the possessed party into the middle of nowhere: out of sight, out of mind.…

By Madeleine Wall Set in 1920s Littlehampton, England, Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Letters is a winking, ahistorical comedy. The upright and morally superior Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) has been receiving expletive laden poison pen letters. Living under the thumb of her father Edward (Timothy Spall) each one shakes the repressed household to their core. They…

By Iman Bundu Beginning with a faux trailer for a Flannery O’Connor story, Wildcat’s play acting feel never subsides. Despite its ambitious structure, Ethan Hawke’s film is marred by an amateurish quality, which conflicts with its self serious tone. Bursts of wry humour come as a relief, hinting at a better film, but such charms…

By Gabrielle Marceau  In 1978, serial killer Rodney Alcala was in the middle of a five-year killing spree when he appeared as a contestant on The Dating Game and won. The stranger-than-fiction cautionary tale is deeply unsettling and symbolically rich—the bachelorette is introduced as a tantalizing prize in front of painted childlike flowers, the bachelors…

By Madeleine Wall “What are you doing here?” Marian Malin (Brigitte Hobmeier) is asked by the locals, her husband, and herself. Fleeing Vienna, the prodigal child has returned to her grandparents’ farm seeking isolation—but she’s not welcome here, not because she’s a stranger, but rather because she knows too much. Unraveling as a slow-burn mystery,…

By Gabrielle Marceau  Mladen Đorđević’s Working Class Goes to Hell wears its title more literally than the 1971 Italian satire, The Working Class Goes to Heaven, it references. While his protagonists don’t get led into the nether world à la The House that Jack Built (2018), Đorđević’s  slow-burn quasi-horror about a group of concerned citizens…

By Winnie Wang “Fatal hyperthermia” is the official designation for four-year-old Anju’s cause of death after she is left on a school bus in the oppressive desert heat. Immediately, accusations are mounted between family members: Ananda (Tannishtha Chatterjee) shouldn’t have let her daughter attend school; Ravina should’ve woken up her younger sister; Gagan (Amit Sial)…

By Michael Sicinski This year, along with his somewhat more experimental featurette Man in Black, Wang released Youth (Spring), a 3 ½ hour direct-cinema examination of life and work in the garment workshops in the city of Zhili. As the title suggests, most of these workers are young men and women, averaging around 22 years…

By James Lattimer It’s become a loose tradition that filmmakers seldom get their first invite to the Cannes Competition for their best films, and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a typical case in point, proving his peerless control of the medium on the one hand while lacking most of the extra layers and…

By Mark Peranson Gartenbaukino, Vienna, Austria, November 1, 2022 Mark Peranson (MP): You are not really a filmmaker who likes to interpret your films, but talks about them more in terms of process, about how the films are made. The Novelist’s Film (2022) is your 27th film. Your 28th film, Walk Up (2022), is showing…

Preceding The Novelist’s Film, Hong Sangsoo’s latest work examining the practice of filmmaking among creative communities, is a triptych of short films by student filmmakers from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), one of the last film schools in North America to require freshmen to shoot on 16mm film. Unified by the use of black-and-white stock in Bolex cameras—which necessitates non-synchronous sound—each film serves as a rich exploration of cinematic time under the singular visions of three emerging artists.

By Adam Nayman Officially, Bertrand Bonello’s last three features comprise a triptych about youth, but there’s also a shadow interpretation waiting to be made of Nocturama (2016), Zombi Child (2019), and Coma as an extended, eccentric treatise on horror-movie history and aesthetics—call it a self-reflexive Trilogy of Terror. Whatever its debts to Le diable probablement…

By Jordan Cronk Among a new generation of German filmmakers, Hamburg’s Helena Wittmann is uniquely elemental, even primal, in her concerns. For over a decade, the 39-year-old artist has been exploring the outer reaches of cinematic storytelling through the medium’s singular ability to transform not only space and time, but also the spectator’s relationship with…

By Angelo Muredda A woman’s observation that lichen has started to grow on a flower she’s been studying for weeks counts as bold narrative progress in Mark Jenkin’s decidedly low-stakes folk-horror curio, Enys Men. Shot in the same striking, hand-processed 16mm stock and set in the same seaside milieu as the director’s lauded feature debut…